Practically all modern computers, from the cheap microcontroller in your dishwasher to high-tech hardware crunching numbers for artificial intelligence systems, rely on versions of the same technology: slabs of silicon patterned with microscopic structures called transistors. Electronic circuits containing transistors can rapidly and reliably toggle between two states, usually labeled “0” and “1.”… Source Practically all modern computers, from the cheap microcontroller in your dishw...

0.0 Context Setting Morning, on Tuesday 18 August 2026, in Portland, Oregon, where I had a summer catchup call in the morning and then a nice catchup with Ted Han, where this brain idea fell out: Algorithms as attention black holes -- the more attention you give them, the bigger they get (and the faster they gobble up even more attention) 0.1 Events Quick one, this, because at this point I suspect you’re just scrolling past them: How People Work, Live! ... with Marcin Wichary...

Back in March I wrote about my new retro motherboard rack using BILLY bookshelves, which someone submitted to the Orange Peanut Gallery. It was a bit of a silly post, but it did solve a real issue I had. The email responses I got were about what you’d expect. Two gentleman seemed irate that I’d “wasted” their time for “just” a shelf, as though I submitted the story myself, drove to their houses, and forced them to read my post over and over until they had opinions about i486 moth...

Many of the people building AI, and many of the people working on AI safety, share a common vision of what a good AI future looks like: We figure out alignment, build superintelligent AI, and it takes over the world, for our benefit. Many people will tell you that last part outright: they think human disempowerment is a good thing because the AIs will be smarter and “more moral” than us. Others don’t outright cheer for disempowerment, but you can infer it from their i...

My blog categories page has, until today, been designed with a functional mindset: the purpose of the page was to list all of the categories I use on my website. But, this week, I started thinking about how I could improve the page, to make it more of a hub to explore different parts of my site, and to elevate the different kinds of writing I do most. One of my main design goals was for the page to be organised into groups, each group representing a different topic about which I write. As I st...

Wiring telemetry and logging into the application and building the spec planning feature using the coding agent Wiring telemetry and logging into the application and building the spec planning feature using the coding agent

The global rush to the Moon this century is catalyzed in major part by the presence of water ice , soil rich in oxygen and metals , and other such resources. The long-term bet is that extracting resources in-situ on Luna, using oxygen and hydrogen as rocket fuel, and manufacturing things there itself will ultimately create an independent enough planetary economy that’s no longer completely dependent on Earth for at least the most basic supplies needed by humans and bots alike. Rockets an...

Fishing for Souls, by Adriaen van de Venne, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at home price declines, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, The Boring Company’s $4 billion fundraise, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing and Cities California is still not building enough housing. “ After years of n...

Glaadvoice.com is an independent web publication covering finance, technology, health and lifestyle. It carries no connection to GLAAD, the media advocacy organisation. The site mixes general news with clinic listings and health blogs, which explains why first-time visitors often arrive expecting something else. Here is what the site publishes, who runs it, and how to reach the team. What Glaadvoice.com Publishes Glaadvoice.com runs two operations under one domain. One side aggregates gene...

Part of the reason why I’m at Thoughtworks is because I’d like to see a software development organization founded on technical excellence as an example for the rest of the industry. The trouble is that I have little aptitude or inclination for the hard work of building such an organization. So I rely on working with people who are prepared to actually put the effort in. A key partner in all of this is Rachel Laycock , who is the global CTO of Thoughtworks. Not just is she far better than...

You might be wondering why I’m already back hiking since I walked more than 40 km just a few days ago. And the answer to that is that I’m not hiking. This was a short stroll to briefly visit a church that would normally be part of the tenth and final segment of this ten-part loop. As I mentioned in my previous post, the second half of this loop is so poorly laid out that some of the churches require some crazy changes to the main path in order to be visited, and the final segment of the ...

I'm writing this from a homely Jacobean-manor-turned-hotel in the West Country , covered in layers of green vines and circled by centenarian trees, on a rare weekend away. Everything is warm: the late afternoon sun, the mustard armchairs, the dark wooden panels along the walls. I'm three teas deep and have a few hours of quiet to think for the first time in many months. Over the summer my baby became a rambunctious toddler, barrelling around the house and narrating our lives in his own langua...

Two V-BATs sat on the deck aboard the Italian Coast Guard patrol vessel Dattilo, ready for a maritime surveillance mission run by Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency. Long before the aircraft reached Dattilo , Shield AI and Global Sat Tech, the operator, began working with the Italian Civil Aviation Authority (ENAC) to secure authorization for the mission. That authorization depended on more than the aircraft itself. ENAC evaluated the specific aircraft configuration, the cr...

One of the most influential 20th century pieces of writing about AI is Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question . Although there are many humans in the story, the protagonist is the computer Multivac, who evolves over the course of ten trillion years from a single datacenter to a universe-spanning mind in hyperspace. Multivac (now called “AC”) ends the story like this: The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, i...

While writing the section of my 2026 Python Packaging Council (PPC) nomination on secure supply chain, I realized that one thing related to having a secure supply chain that we lack is a defined way to perform reproducible builds . The reason I like the idea of making reproducible builds work is that I think it can be done in such a way as to not require any work on the part of the producer of a distribution (which is a technical term for sdists or wheels , i.e., the people who upload stuf...

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In the before-times, when Raspberry Pi CM5s were (relatively) affordable, I built a number of Pi clusters ( example ), and one of the most annoying parts of the build was flashing Raspberry Pi OS to all the Pis. One, two, or even three Pis isn't a big deal, but once you hit 4+, the process of plugging the Compute Module into a carrier board, plugging that into a computer, managing Raspberry Pi Imager, and trying to match up details like a hostname, MAC address, and the physical Pi itself,...

In the past, new PhD students would ask how they could succeed when they had to compete with the likes of say, Richard Karp or Avi Wigderson. I would say Karp and Wigderson have limited bandwidth and you can work on problems they don't work on, or think deeper about a problem than Karp or Wigderson has time to. Now we get the same question but with names like Claude and ChatGPT and it's hard to make the same bandwidth argument. What do we tell them as we get closer to Math AGI? What even is Math...

Anthropic recently announced that in compliance with a new EU AI generated content law, they will be watermarking content generated using their models. While there are differing opinions on whether this is a good or bad thing as well as excellent interactive explainers on how it works, I was interested in the underlying mechanics behind it. Anthropic cites SynthID-Text as their methodology which builds upon work done here . Text watermarking To summarize, at each token position, the ...

Did you know that LinkedIn caps you at 200 connection requests per week? There are a few finite resources in the world, but nothing seems as finite as LinkedIn’s connection requests. One of the easiest things I could change if I could go back in time was to spend more weeks and add everyone from my target audience to my LinkedIn list. Why? Because this would mean whenever I post something new about my product, they see it, they share it, and it increases my success with their entire netw...

Research report · Internet Archive holdings · 17 August 2026 Short answer: the engineering trade press litigated every element of the modern datacenter backup-power design between 1996 and 2010, and settled it — a standby generator plus a flywheel sized to the ~10 seconds the generator needs to start. We read ~1,950 issues of nine periodicals in the Internet Archive’s scanned collections (59 feature articles in full) while specifying a 400 kW natural-gas emergency plant, and this is wha...

Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B , an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab. I've been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its predecessor Qwen 3.6 27B was impressive. Qwen's self-reported benchmarks for this model are eye-opening. They show a boost from both Qwen 3.6 27B and the closed-weight Qwen 3.7-Plus, which was one of Qwen's strongest models of any size as ...

Like most programming languages, Go has both stack allocations, whose lifetime is limited to the current function, and dynamic (or heap) allocations. The name stack comes from the fact that the memory management is somewhat trivial. There is typically one stack per thread (or goroutine in Go). When a function needs memory, it simply appends data to the stack. When the function returns, the memory is dropped from the end of the stack. So the memory last allocated is deallocated first. Heap me...